My Friend Mahmoud Khalil Was Released After Three Months in ICE Detention. What His Case Means for Palestinian Time and Continuity.

*This commentary piece is published under a pseudonym in order to protect the author’s safety.

“Ma’am there is no list,” said a man in a white polo and dark cargo pants, his thick Southern accent cutting through the heavy Louisiana heat. 

Shifting in my seat, I rolled the window down further, letting the swampy air rush in. My skin peeled away from the leather seat as I sat up and replied, “Sir, I was told I was on the list.” More indignant now, he raised his voice: “Ma’am, I’m the Warden here. I would know if there was a list.”

Several tense exchanges later, he discovered that there was, in fact, a list. Welcome news considering I had just flown from New York to Atlanta, then to Louisiana, and now had driven nearly an hour to a remote ICE detention center in a small town called Jena, where Mahmoud Khalil was being held. 

Two months had passed since I’d last seen him. I knew Mahmoud well enough to understand he wouldn’t tell us if he were suffering. He’d protect us from worry. So I went to see for myself.

When I was finally allowed into the parking lot, I opened the car door and stepped out into the marshy stillness. The scent of loblolly pines filled the air as I stared out at the barbed-wire-laced facility. All I could think of was the cruelty: how in less than 24 hours, Mahmoud had been abducted, transported, processed, flown, and disappeared into these woods–without warrant, without charges, without contact. 

Upon hearing of his arrest in March, I thought it had to be some clerical error. Maybe it was a scare tactic by universities trying to quell anti-genocide protests. 

Mahmoud? Of all people? We’d led the dabke circle together during the encampment. We read poetry for an event dedicated to renowned Palestinian poet Rafaat Alareer. We laughed and ate our way through Palestine Day, an annual celebration in New Jersey. 

As a student during the pro-Palestine movement, I was used to hearing about brief detentions of activists. I thought this would be the same: a few hours at the detention center, maybe the full day. 

Mahmoud has a green card. He has done nothing wrong.

In the days that followed his arrest, I saw my friend’s face plastered across news stations, tabloids, and social media. His sweet demeanor turned villainous. 

No matter how many times I explained or how loud I screamed, the cesspool of social media washed away all logic, stripped him of his humanity, and pushed forward a false caricature so divorced from reality it made me question reality itself. 

I waited for our university to speak up, to acknowledge how federal agents were able to trespass on campus property and unlawfully abduct one of our  students.  We were met with silence. And it would be months before they would even say his name. 

I didn’t leave my apartment for weeks. I was terrified to go to campus, terrified to voice my concerns to university administrators. I feared they would target another Palestinian student next and take us out one by one. 

I sat in my room frantic, distraught, and waiting for news of his release. Everytime my apartment door rattled, I would stare at it and repeat my “Know Your Rights” training. It would take weeks before I could feel normal again. But my fear was nothing compared to the cruelty Mahmoud endured, the hate hurled at his incredibly graceful wife, Noor, or the fear imprinted upon their unborn son, Deen.

When I found out about his asylum hearing happening on May 22, I knew I needed to be there. Not knowing what to expect, I made my way to Louisiana. The courtroom was frigid, fluorescent—surreal. When I walked in, Mahmoud spotted me and waved, smiling as if we were meeting at a café, as if to reassure me.

The rest of the day felt like a scene from the movie My Cousin Vinny, a southern judge and the big city lawyer lost in translation. I heard horrific testimonies from witnesses outlining all the different ways Mahmoud could be targeted, abducted, or even assassinated by foreign agents if he were sent back to Syria or Algeria. My head was filled with information that haunt me to this day: the length of the Algerian border is twice the size of the US-Mexico border and torture techniques could include extraction of fingernails, beatings, and sleep deprivation. 

The case was supposed to end at noon, but continued well after. During one of the breaks, I remember standing in the gray cinder block lobby and hearing a repetitive beat pierce the stillness. 

“Do you hear that?” I asked the others.

I stepped towards the door and as it opened chants came flooding in from the surrounding forest. The same loblolly pines that would invite me to observe the detention center upon arriving would carry the sweet sounds of protest and hope. It was the sound of people saving people, a community believing that humanity extends beyond borders and walls. 

Hundreds of activists from Louisiana and beyond had come to support Mahmoud, marching in the blistering heat until they reached the front of the facility where they stayed for hours undeterred.

That kind of presence–the sheer insistence of it–felt electric. Their voices became fuel. In that moment, protest felt like something sacred. A transfer of energy. A reclamation.

Out of their bodies and into my ears, I walked back into the facility and into a hallway where I would find Mahmoud having lunch. A security guard quickly attempted to usher me from him, but I managed to tell Mahmoud about the crowd outside, the people loudly calling his name through the trees. Mahmoud’s face lit up. 

“They’re fighting for you!” I shouted to him as I was escorted back into the courtroom. 

The hearing dragged on for several hours after that. Unfortunately, I had to make my way back to New York before any resolution was reached. I left the facility feeling crushed by the system, but revived in spirit. I didn’t know when Mahmoud would be released, but I believed he would be. 

That belief, however, brought me to a realization: Palestinians are constantly forced to negotiate with time–today and tomorrow, locally and globally, literally and existentially. Time is not a neutral backdrop for us; it’s something we must constantly navigate, bend, and survive. So much so, I would argue Palestinian time should be its own time zone at this point. It doesn’t move in a straight line. It is so frequently pulled apart and compressed, borrowed and stolen, delayed and denied–with so little regard for Palestinian life–it no longer fits the conventions of temporal reality. 

Instead, like a hand fan—forced to open wide and then fold back in, again and again, waved through space not at leisure, but in resistance. It flutters between eras of waiting and moments of rupture, sweeping across checkpoints, exile, ceasefires, and uprisings. Each expansion carries the weight of longing and survival, representing the array of possible futures; each contraction, the collapse of those futures to static points of loss for historians to capitalize upon. Linear time becomes a privilege denied, and yet  a battleground that is just as much a target of the colonial project as the land itself.  Mahmoud’s 109 day detention is no exception. 

When he was abducted, it felt as if time stood still. My fellow Palestinian students and I were frozen in place, everything stopped. We stopped going to class. We stopped doing our assignments.  We stopped leaving our apartments. We stopped speaking out. Time slowed around us, while accelerating around Mahmoud–from Manhattan to New Jersey to Louisiana, in hours. Media attention on Mahmoud was immediate and increasing, his name becoming internationally recognized. We wanted to hit the pause button, call a timeout, and slow the chaos. But we would soon discover, despite our urge to act, we were forced to wait. 

In these moments, I thought about how time was not only being simultaneously accelerated, slowed down, and stolen from Mahmoud and his wife Noor, but also from their infant son. He would miss hearing his father’s voice in his final days in utero. He would miss his father reciting Adhan in his ear upon birth. And, as months would go by, Deen would miss vital imprinting moments, where an infant associates voice tone with emotional meaning and absorbs the phonetic structure of language.  In this sense, baby Deen’s days were equivalent to adult years in yet another dimension of stolen time. 

How many years would it be before his father was fully exonerated? How much time would be lost fighting a battle to quell his free speech? Speech that simply sought to highlight yet another dimension of Palestinian temporal realities: Over 600 days of genocide and 77 years of occupation.

Today, as Gaza starves, every minute becomes more urgent than the next, until a point of no return is reached. In the final stage of starvation, even if food is provided, the human body cannot reverse the damage. Desperate for protein, it begins the irreversible process of breaking down its own muscle tissue.

In this sense, time stops moving forward with the cadence and buoyancy we associate with linear temporality. It begins to grow heavier. Those once-urgent minutes become thick and slow. A Palestinian minute becomes unlike any other, holding an unaccounted weight. Sped up or slowed down, its cut varies in depth, but it always cuts.

Palestinians are constantly asked to wait. Wait for prisoners to be released. Wait for a ceasefire. Wait for an end to the occupation and the right to return.  With critics placing Palestinian refugee’s insistence on the right of return in some nostalgic past. Or the diaspora’s fight for justice in some utopian future. The reality is however, Palestinians are not mourning a nostalgic past or a utopic future. 

We mourn our right to continuity. We mourn our right to have naturally evolved as a society without the world fracturing us into unrecognizable silos of divergent Palestinian identities. What was, and continues to be stolen from us is not just land, it’s our right to time itself. 

The right to continuity means Mahmoud gets to graduate with his peers. It means Mahmoud gets to see his son be born. 

The right to continuity is Gaza never having been besieged, not an endless siege, occupation, and genocide. 

The right to continuity is seeing our neighbors age, our trees grow, our streets evolve, and our poetry and songs become known beyond the trope of “resistance anthems.” Yes, we advocate for a future free Palestine and the right to return, not because we are bitter, lost, or lack vision, but because we insist on existing and evolving without brutal disruptions, displacement, detainment. As scholar Nasser Aburahme puts it, “…Palestinian insistence on return is a refusal to abide by the closure of the past into settler futurity. Palestinian struggle does not just happen in the open time of dispossession; it happens over this time…”

To me, Palestinian identity is helical, intertwined strands of land and time perpetually weaving towards, and away, from one another. Our time is both expansive in its patience for a liberated future and contractive in maintaining that each life is precious and urgent. As it weaves towards and away from identities of nationhood, moments like Mahmoud’s abduction and release remind me that my loyalty is to justice. Not for a nostalgic past, or an imagined future, but an acknowledgement of the fracture, the disruption, the loss of continuity that comes with natural societal evolution. 

On June 20th, Mahmoud was released on bail. The next day, he walked out into Newark Airport in New Jersey as a free man.  

When I saw him, I nervously kept the tradition of my late grandmother alive by reciting celebratory Muhaha. A tradition that has since been stifled, or in some instances, forbidden to practice during prisoner releases in historic Palestine.

Although Mahmoud has been granted a moment of reprieve, his temporal fight towards justice remains futilely long. 

Mahmoud is fighting the occupation of time, a concept all too familiar for Palestinians.